coffee!” Pietro’s call reverberated in the uncluttered house. “My older brother,” he added as he put a cup before me. His hand was shaking slightly: Was it too many cigarettes or the fact that we were now truly alone together for the first time?
“I never asked you,” I said, stirring my sugar with undue care. “How was your stay on the farm?”
“Same old same old.”
“What do you mean?”
“Hellish as always!”
This clarification came not from Pietro but from an equally deep voice. A man with thinning black hair and a familiarly sharp, if slightly subtler, nose came toward me. Still standing, he said, “Gabriele, pleased to meet you. Let me tell you now, if you ever get invited to the farm, just say no. It’ll save you a lot of grief.”
“Don’t listen to him. It’s not that terrible.”
“No, it’s not that terrible,” said Gabriele theatrically. “How should we call it then, bucolic? Elegiac? Evocative and thought-provoking?”
“I have to apologize for Gabriele. He doesn’t appreciate fresh air. He prefers smog.”
Gabriele lit a cigarette and appeared to draw life-giving oxygen from it. “My baby brother is a bit blind. It’s not his fault: he’s the favorite. And he deserves it.” Then he looked at Pietro with a kind of love I’d never seen before, a furious adoration that made me lower my eyes. “Now, I’d love to ask you a zillion questions, but I’m sure my brother here would rather ask you himself, and anyway I have a design to finish by the end of the week. So I’ll be out of your hair now.” He downed his coffee.
“Are you an artist?” I asked, because suddenly I couldn’t bear for Gabriele to go off and leave us alone.
“I study architecture.”
“My brother’s an architect too.”
“Lucky him. I’m afraid for me it’s only a dream. Farewell for now, Eddie, but I’m sure I’ll see you again soon.”
With a heavy gait, Gabriele disappeared up that staircase. What had he meant by see you again soon? I had the distinct feeling that Pietro had told his brother about me. And yet, what was there to tell?
Espressos take such a painfully short time to drink. After a difficult pause Pietro asked me if I liked rocks. The question was hopelessly generic but I clung to it nonetheless. I told him about how when I was little my father would sometimes take me to the beach to search for fossils, and about his many film canisters of sands, treasures collected around the world. He too had studied geology before having to change majors, something that secretly made me feel I had a privileged, almost genetic, relationship to rocks. “On the beach my dad used one of those, what’s it called, a kind of hammer …”
“A prospecting pick,” Pietro said excitedly. “Yes, I have one.”
“Really?”
“All geology students have to own one. It’s a tool of the trade, like a sword to a knight.” He was laughing but looking intently now into his empty cup, like he was reading his fortune in the swirl of sugar crystals. All of a sudden he leveled his eyes with mine. “Would you like to see it? It’s upstairs.”
It wasn’t just a coffee. Despite my wild heartbeat, there was a certain relief in giving in to that knowledge. As I followed him up the staircase, I had to restrain a smile. Wasn’t it just like fourth grade, inviting a girl into your room to see a rock pick or a butterfly collection? Couldn’t he have come up with something better? But it was in fact the childishness of that fib that made the invitation acceptable. And the comfort brought on by that lovely little lie, of which we were both willing participants, wiped away all doubt, there wasn’t even a shadow of it now, that, on the third occasion that we’d ever spoken, once upstairs we would kiss.
Pietro’s room was the size of a closet, or at best a cabin on a ship, with the port mounted like a jewel in the window. There was hardly enough space for a single bed, a makeshift bookshelf, and a Jimi Hendrix poster. Pietro lifted his prospecting pick off the shelf and offered it to me as if it were made of the most translucent porcelain. He showed me how his name was carved into the handle, by his own hand. As I listened to him, I stole glances at his fleshy lower lip, wondering how on earth we were going to shift from a pick to a kiss.
“Sorry it’s such a small room,” he said. “If you want to sit down, you can use the bed.”
So this was how it was going to happen. I sat down, surrendering to that little twist and turn of fate. But I was out of my depth. I couldn’t comprehend how I’d ended up there, in a stranger’s room, on his bed. A slippery dip in blood pressure made my head go light and my body heavy like a bag of stones I suddenly had to bear. But at this point I was committed to seeing it through. I was already imagining being back in the safety of my own room, retasting the kiss that hadn’t happened yet—or, it now occurred to me, trying to erase the memory of it.
Pietro sat next to me, saying simply, “I might lie down.” He lowered the prospecting pick to the floor and stretched out comfortably, his legs pointing toward the sea.
I lay down, too, and this somewhat eased my light-headedness. We stayed there on our backs on that tiny bed, the kind children sleep in, while each and every pretense rose like steam up to the ceiling. For a long while we looked at the slanting ceiling, a mirror in which I could see reflected back to me a dizzying array of possibilities.
I asked, “Are you a Jimi Hendrix fan?”
“Not really. I just thought the poster looked cool.” His voice was as close to me as it had ever been, and at such low volume it sounded deeper still. I wanted him to say more, and more. Instead he asked me what kind of music I liked.
“I don’t know, quite a range.” I shrugged at the ceiling. “I liked the songs you taped for me.”
He laughed uneasily. “I thought a lot about what I was going to put on that tape. It took me hours.”
“But you didn’t even know me.”
“It was like a sixth sense, Heddi.”
There was a grave silence. I couldn’t possibly turn my face toward him now, with his breath so close I could taste it. All at once, the ceiling went dark and there was a collision of sandpaper with my mouth. Startled, I pulled away. Oh god, it had gone horribly wrong, it had all turned out very high school … very liceo.
“What’s wrong? Are you all right?”
“You just surprised me, that’s all.”
“You mean you didn’t think I was going to kiss you?” And he fell dejectedly back on the bed.
Part of me wanted to walk out then and there and forget all about it. But a voice deep inside—and perhaps it was nothing but my familiar thirst for knowledge—told me I had to stay, to push through the awkwardness and the shame. I had to know. So I leaned over him, a rush of blood to my head instantly curing my low blood pressure, and I brushed his lips with mine as if to shush him. Pietro craned his neck to reach me with his mouth, like he was passing me a Halloween apple with his hands tied. I pulled back, burned by his stubble. Was this how they kissed in the province of Avellino?
I was still looking at his plump lower lip and without thinking I gently bit it. He let me. He just lay there, eyelids shut and breathing heavily, perhaps afraid of what I might do next. I didn’t know myself.
In a show of goodwill, again I pressed my lips against his. And this time his mouth opened soft and sweet like a fresh fig. It was warmed by the sun and ripe, just right, and I wanted more. Another kiss, and yet another, and soon our mouths were feeding off each other, one taste leading inevitably to the next but never satisfying. Before long we were scrambling for them, greedily, individually, as they disappeared one by one like cherries from a bowl. In the end there might even be a winner and a loser.
I was